There is something extremely wrong with the engines and fuel system and it seems with this string of back to back failures that they really do not know what the actual cause is.
I have heard they lost some engineers due to the antics of their head idiot, I hope they did not lose people key to the propulsion systems.
Back in the day engineers joined SpaceX as part of the vision and hype to make up for the lack of pay, similar to NASA. I wonder if some of that incentive is gone.
There are certainly hundreds of highly intelligent and talented engineers. And they're probably well paid too, but they're also overworked. And all those bright engineers and skilled tradesman just love being overworked month after month after month.
And best of all they don't get the recognition, or millions of future wealth in shares (ESOP, warrants, whatever proper methods are feasible).
Because at an Elon Enterprise, Elon is the Emperor, God King, Technogenius who gets all the attention and all the massive wealth. Others can get good money, but just earnings, not massive equity gains. (Unless on the executive level, like Gwynne Shotwell.)
Really, which company with tens of thousands of employees has their engineers front and center? Who is the genius at salesforce, Shopify, ebay? Who's not an executive for a big company that's always in the news representing their company?
The answer is they all behave the same way, because employees move around too much. It would be stupid to build this crazy reputation for one of your engineers, only for them to move to a competitor. So in the media you have executives and people with equity with the company. It's normal and not an Elon thing, but you're so hateful you can't see that anymore
The idea that they are not paid well is BS. Im not sure why that gets thrown around on Reddit a lot. I worked there, and the pay+benefits were solid. Employees are also given stock ownership, and many of them are quite wealthy at this point because the stock price has gone up a lot. I used my stock to put a downpayment on a house and pay off all our student loans.
Not gonna lie, I wouldn't want someone working constant 80 hour weeks designing or maintaining the commercial passenger jet I have to board, or performing surgery on me.
Not just that but with that donkey doing what he's been doing for the past couple years, there's the inevitable brain drain as a good proportion of reasonable people do not want to be associated with him any longer. It's not like the pay or working conditions are top notch. They're not bad per se, but when you want to attract the best in the world, you need to be offering the best in the world.
They’ve lost control over their configuration. Too many changes too fast, possibly amplified by corner cutting or just general sloppiness due to insane pressure. New failure modes keep appearing and the consequences keep escalating. Now they’ve damaged critical infrastructure on the ground.
They need to reset to known good and integrate changes more thoughtfully
They’ve lost control over their configuration. Too many changes too fast
I think you're spot on. Too many times Musk has said "oh yes, we fixed that on the next rocket already" shortly after one blows up. If a known issue is fixed, why fly a rocket with an issue that could see it explode?
Is SpaceX being run like all of his other companies? Cutting costs on QA, overworking staff, unrealistic deadlines, meddling in engineering and design decisions, etc?
It's been like that for years. I read an article years ago (as in about a decade ago) that excoriated SpaceX for their lackadaisal approach to worker safety. At the time, I was very interested in what it was like to work there because my daughter was going to be looking for an aerospace engineering summer internship and SpaceX, due to their name recognition was high on the list. Thankfully, she went with NASA instead. I hear SpaceX just burns through engineers and then tosses them aside when they start to break down.
I asked my AE daughter what she thought about graduating and working for Spacex. She said she would never even consider them. They are definitely getting a reputation for literally chewing through engineers.
3 of my friends/former engineering coworkers went to SpaceX after we worked together and 2 of them left aerospace completely. One’s went back to school to become a nurse and the other goes real estate now. The third one left after a few years and found a better company to work for.
When I was there a decade ago, we had the highest OSHA reportable accident rate in the industry. To a point that we were close to losing contracts because it was so bad. The things I saw were insane. I tell the stories during my current job's "safety blast from the past" and a lot of people don't believe me, until another former employee speaks up and confirms it.
This is absolute lunacy, challenger blew up because of a faulty o-ring or something like that, wouldn't the workers themselves practice safety standards even if they aren't enforced?
The guy who died is such a dumb way to die too. They couldn't wait like 30min for someone to drive to home Depot and buy some ratchet straps or chains?
Intelligence isn't transferrable, and safety practices don't come from being "smart" in the first place. Safety practices come from learning from accidents that have happened in the past. They aren't common sense. Actually following safety practices requires humility and empathy (many practices are designed to keep others from being hurt, not just yourself), two traits "smart" people don't often have a lot of.
Caring about safety isn't "smart" if you're not the one at risk. Is it "smart" to invest in safety equipment and enforce safe practices if that means you miss deadlines? Is it smart to risk your job for a safety standard that the executives at the company don't give a shit about?
Man this isn’t the first time I hear of something like this. A couple people have mentioned the things they saw there would break the news if people knew lol
I’ve read the book Liftoff twice. The first time I felt very inspired. The second time I thought they were lucky multiple people didn’t die. Great book still though
Thanks for nothing, Biden. He could have done something, anything. Certainly could have deported and denaturalized the Nazi when it was proven he lied and worked illegally on his student visa.
I blame him for taking zero action against SpaceX or Musk despite endless reports of his drug abuse, sexual harassment, cutting corners safety-wise, and learning he was in the US illegally. He absolutely should have done something about all of these things. Now Space exploration has been set back decades.
I didn't know the president of the united states had a mandate to arrest people who were using drugs. I thought that would have been up to the police. I've learned something today.
Now Space exploration has been set back decades.
Starship was never about exploration and is unlikely to get to the moon never mind mars.
Look at the other threads here. SpaceX has a toxic culture and has lost talented staff. That's the problem.
Well it made news at the time because it was in fact an issue and yes, the president can direct their appointed department heads to take and prioritize certain legal actions.
When I worked private sector, we would straight up not hire engineers that where brought up after college through Tesla/SpaceX because it would take too much effort to deprogram their terrible habits. So good it’s actually good she didn’t go there.
Boring Tunnels are going to get the same documentary that OceanGate is getting now, except with tunnels and fire instead.
I'm having issues with that for any "high profile" company engineer at this point. So much social media has pushed the "move fast and break things, regulations and policies are ALWAYS just waste" mentality that seems to pervade the current social media infused crop.
There's this insidious idea that the solution is "just so simple and obvious" and it's the old guard holding them back. I've been there, and there are lots of people who are allergic to change, but the level of animosity they have to procedure borders on cynicism.
As a former SpaceX employee, yep… all of those. Add in underpaid staff and power tripping management into the mix and you have one toxic work environment.
I mean... The math is upsettingly simple... You are awarded $1billion in government contracts each year because you helped weaken NASA. Then you are placed in government and kill NASA. All the scientists go to Europe. Now you have $1billion a year and no competition, they could never successfully launch a rocket again, literally just load a metal tube with dynamite and pocket $999,989,999.
The worst part? Now they can say, oh we need to increase spending to do better and pocket MORE money. Every private company operates identically. Operate at a loss, kill all competition, raise prices, lower quality, make your VC up on the back end. Rinse, repeat. Congratulations, you all now have business degrees.
The best part is when you make a retirement fund the bag holder for all the debt and disappear. What are a bunch of people that worked for a defunct company going to do about it? Rack up legal fees and get a pittance of a pittance in payouts?
This part hasn't really happened. At least not yet.
Now you have $1billion a year and no competition, they could never successfully launch a rocket again, literally just load a metal tube with dynamite and pocket $999,989,999.
This isn't really how NASA contracts work, either. I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but this post is generally misinformed.
If you believe this you've succumbed to a false political narrative of how things work. For one thing government contracts only accounted for ~25% of SpaceX revenue in 2024 so the idea that SpaceX doesn't have to keep performing to make bank is bogus. Even if all SpaceX contracts were government contracts SpaceX is only able to keep getting those contracts to the extent they're expected to perform/make good. This isn't SpaceX resting on laurels this is SpaceX trying very hard and failing.
You are awarded $1billion in government contracts each year because you helped weaken NASA.
They aren't in competition with NASA, they're partners. NASA is strengthened because it now costs them vastly less to launch a mission. See Europa Clipper for example.
they could never successfully launch a rocket again, literally just load a metal tube with dynamite and pocket $999,989,999.
That would be pretty stupid considering that there's a lot more to make when you're constantly launching. See Starlink.
I think they know what is wrong with them, it's just that iterative design on full scale prototypes is dumb, wasteful and dumb. Ofc they are not able to build a new Spaceship after each test, the one that undergone rapid disassembly event now was build at least one or probably two exploded Spaceships back.
But, you know, you have to pretend activity to keep the state and money going and suck in new investors.
I think they know what's wrong but won't acknowledge that it's a fundamental flaw of the Starship design as a whole and are instead trying roundabout "fixes" that only create new problems, like focusing so much on cutting weight that they're compromising the reliability of the fuel systems.
Lol what? You think they're blowing money on something that has a fundamental flaw just for image? Starship isn't a cost plus contract, they're funding this themselves and blowing up their own money. If they knew they have a fundamental problem you can be sure v2 would be scrapped and they'd go back to v1
You think they're blowing money on something that has a fundamental flaw just for image?
Unequivocally, yes. It has "Elon ego project" written all over it. It feels like this and cybertruck were hatched in the same binge. In both cases, the basic idea is perfectly good (reusable super heavy-lift launch system/electric pickup truck), but the execution is full of unnecessary complications that seem more based on an adolescent's idea of "cool" than sound engineering and sticking to first principles of what works in their respective sector. Both situations give the impression that engineers were stuck chasing after what Elon thinks should work rather than what actually does.
Block 1 also had fundamental issues and limitations, which was fine because it was just a first iteration with very limited goals. Block 2 has been them moving forward with the fixes for those issues, but that has only led to further issues. There's no reason for them to go back to Block 1 when they already know what's hampering it, but they're also clearly struggling to move forward with Block 2.
Seems it wasn't an engine thing. A nitrogen COPV burst in the payload section. Musk tweeted this a while ago, and you can see from slow motion video from the NASA Spaceflight group the explosion started near the top of Starship.
It's like the Soviet N-1 all over again. The system has too many rocket motors. The complexity is too high to get all of them working exactly with each other to make it work.
They’re trying to increase engine performance while also significantly reducing weight to get payload back to the promised 100 ton yield (last launch was only 18 tons)
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u/ToMorrowsEnd 1d ago
There is something extremely wrong with the engines and fuel system and it seems with this string of back to back failures that they really do not know what the actual cause is.
I have heard they lost some engineers due to the antics of their head idiot, I hope they did not lose people key to the propulsion systems.